He Still Lives Here

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha on August thirtieth, nineteen thirty. He bought his first stock at eleven years old, filed his first income tax return at thirteen, and by the time he was twenty-five had already returned to Omaha after working for his mentor Benjamin Graham in New York. He never really left again.

That is the part that surprises people who visit. The man who built Berkshire Hathaway into one of the largest companies in the world still lives in the same house he bought in nineteen fifty-eight, a stucco house in a residential neighborhood near Farnam Street. He has sometimes described it as the third-best investment he ever made. The house cost thirty-one thousand five hundred dollars.

Buffett began buying shares of Berkshire Hathaway, then a struggling New England textile mill, in nineteen sixty-two. He gained control in nineteen sixty-five and spent the next decade converting it from a failing fabric company into a holding vehicle for insurance companies, newspapers, and consumer businesses. The pivot worked spectacularly. For decades, the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in Omaha drew tens of thousands of investors to the city each spring, an event locals nicknamed the Woodstock for Capitalists.

The nickname for Buffett himself, the Oracle of Omaha, came from investors who treated his annual letters and public statements the way a previous generation might have treated economic prophecy. The letters, mailed each year from his Omaha office, are studied in business schools around the world.

He spent fifty-five years as Berkshire's chief executive before announcing his retirement in twenty twenty-five. His chosen successor, Greg Abel, is continuing the operation from the same Omaha headquarters.